January 23, 2018

British agtech startup KisanHub has raised £1.75 million (US$2.45 million) in follow-on seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm, Notion Capital and IQ Capital, and included participation from Calibration Management and additional unidentified angel investors.

This funding follows an initial $1 million Seed Round raised in July 2017 from Notion Capital and strategic partner and customer, NIAB.

Launched out of the Cambridge University Judge Business School’s Accelerate Program by Dr. Sachin Shende and Giles Barker in 2013, and with operations in Pune, India, KisanHub has developed a SaaS platform that integrates with users’ existing processes. Combining precision agriculture, big data, cloud computing, machine learning, and mobile capabilities, KisanHub aims to deliver clear decision points designed to make the agricultural supply chain predictable and profitable for its current user base of 3,000. The platform also is capable of offering recommendations on crop protection inputs, and to give compliance guidance and market data for the potato industry.

Dr. Sachin Shende, KisanHub chief executive and former farmer, explained to TechCrunch last year when the company raised its initial funding that the company’s technology can be applied to a farming operation through the integration of farm location, crop, and weather data to forecast pest infestations or disease outbreaks, or the integration of crop, field, soil and weather data to pinpoint the exact rate of irrigation needed.

“The global agriculture industry was slower to see digital progress than many other sectors, however, recent years have brought significant technological innovation and vastly improved access to data. It is immensely exciting to see KisanHub sit at the heart of this ongoing shift, as a data intelligence platform that benefits all those that participate in food production and distribution, including growers, producer groups, machinery manufacturers and agronomists amongst others,” said Patrick Norris, Notion Capital.

Funding from this follow-on round will be used by the company to accelerate the development of its technology. Part of this plan is to begin integrating data generated by farm machinery into the existing platform, reports AgFunder. There are also plans to double the size of the team through the addition of customer service and sales positions, as well as team members who will work with the machine learning aspect of the company alongside Roberto Cipolla, Scientific Advisor Professor with the Cambridge University Engineering Department.

“With the new investment, we will kick start the hardware deployment in the UK, attract new talent into sales and customer success functions and expand our engineering capabilities to deliver end-to-end supply chain solutions,” said Shende.

“KisanHub is leading the emerging field of Agri-tech data capture and crop forecasting and prediction through their Crop Intelligence Platform which is already being used by the largest Trials and Producer Group companies” said Kerry Baldwin with IQ Capital. “The combination of having created the most advanced algorithms dedicated to this field, together with a strong focus on ease of installation and usability, creates a compelling ROI and will drive adoption of this technology throughout the Agri-tech sector.”

-Lynda Kiernan